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Sequoia Capital is one of the famed Silicon Valley venture capital firms, with past investments in Apple, Cisco, Google, and Oracle.

In this year’s Midas List, Sequoia this year had 5 partners in the top 20 on the list. Last year, Sequoia’s Michael Moritz announced he was stepping back from management duties at the firm due to an undisclosed illness. In this interview and video above, Sequoia’s Douglas Leone, who has managed the firm with Moritz for about 15 years, talks about what has happened since Moritz’s move. He also talks about Sequoia’s secrets to success and how it tends to hire and a particular type of person–hint: think humble beginnings and an immigrant background. Leone’s recent exits include Meraki, which was acquired by Cisco for $1.2 billion and ServiceNow, which was one of the larger IPOs of 2012 (market cap: $4.8 billion).

In our interview, Leone also has some criticism of the increasing use of marketing and public relations among venture capital firms. It’s not hard to figure out who he’s talking about. Sequoia has traditionally done little media, preferring for its portfolio companies get the exposure–though it has recently ramped up in that and he explains why in our interview.

Sequoia’s office space is telling about the firm, Leone says. The investment partners don’t get fancy offices (or fancy art, for that matter). Instead all the investors occupy an open space together with standing desks. And language is very important to Leone. He never uses the word “deal” to refer to his companies. Sequoia calls them “partners.” Here’s an edited transcript of the interview with Leone:

How healthy is the venture industry today?

The venture industry is both quite vibrant and quite competitive. When we called Fred Luddy, (at the time) the CEO of ServiceNow, he was getting calls from every venture firm under the sun. So we had to go the extra mile to try to convince him that we’re quite different and that we could help him to build a business. Four years later the company has a $4.5 billion market cap. But it’s a quite competitive business with everybody saying the exactly same thing and only a few firms being able to deliver.

How do you pitch that to entrepreneurs?

It’s not exactly a pitch. It’s an understanding of business. You meet with a CEO or founder. You talk about sales, engineering, product management and give some ideas or suggestions. And the founder quickly understands that you really can help them both operationally and from a strategic standpoint. From those conversations you build trust. It’s not all about telling the founder how great he is or how great the company is. It’s really having a straightforward conversation where you can build trust. By doing so he really starts to believe you can help him. That’s how he chooses you as an investor and a business partner for the long term.

Last year, Michael Moritz announced he was stepping back from management duties at Sequoia. How has that changed things here?

Things have not really changed that much. We’ve tried to build Sequoia Capital with an eye for the long term, that we really look for in the companies we like to partner with. When Sequoia began 40 years ago it wasn’t named Valentine Ventures. It didn’t have names on the door. We worked very hard at making sure there’s not a single point of failure. Mike and I were the two managing partners, if you will, for last 15, 16 years.

So when Mike decided to back off for health reasons and spend a lot of time with young companies, we had a backup plan in place that was built in. So nothing much has changed. If anything we have more of Mike Moritz now in the venture business.

He’s still active with companies?

He’s very active with the companies. The only thing he’s not doing is all the paperwork, all the managing and working with India, China and Israel. Basically not doing much of the overhead. He’s leaving that all up to me.

What’s your approach to working with entrepreneurs?

We take building each company quite seriously. We work with the founders and management teams quite seriously. We do not employ a “spray and pray” strategy where we invest in 30 or 40 companies and make lots of promises that we could not possibly keep, then only try to spend time with 4 or 5 that have a heartbeat. So we really work with each company we partner with and make an investment in, whether that’s a seed investment or Palo Alto Networks or some of the many others. We spend a lot of time.

Or a company like Meraki, where we did the Series A investment and (went) through four generations of business plans and met every week until we finally hit on a business plan that worked. We sold Meraki, as did the founder and CEO, to Cisco for $1.2 billion just a few months ago. These relationships take a lot of time. And we call ourselves “business partners” not “investors” for the simple reason that we’re with them every step of the way.

How do you feel about venture firms recently heavily using marketing or public relations?

Well I’m quite embarrassed by it. Because our business is all about helping someone–a founder, a CEO–building a great business. It’s not about seeing our names in the press. I’m not quite sure why firms do it. It might be for ego reasons or it might be because they think they’ll get more deal flow. But the founders and management teams do 95% of the work. They’re the ones who should be in the limelight. Furthermore, when you put the founder and company in the limelight they’re more likely to get customers. So for the life of me, I can’t imagine why as soon as a company has an outcome, many venture firms should press release in a matter of microseconds. As I said I’m quite embarrassed by it. And it’s a practice we do not adhere to at Sequoia Capital.

You have preferred to stay behind scenes in the past. Has that changed?

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